One of the big challenges when I go food shopping has always been to find good eggs. By good eggs, I mean eggs with hard shells and rich orange yolks. The problem in the U.S. is that there are very few places where you can reliably find chicken eggs that meet these basic standards. The egg shelves in most supermarkets are dominated by eggs with thin shells and pale yellow yolks–what I would call junk eggs.
One of the reasons I love to visit Europe is that you can reliably find the kind of eggs I crave. In supermarkets and food stores of all kinds, they’re unrefrigerated in egg cartons, available for sale individually or by the dozen.
But I’m not in Europe most of the time, I’m in the U.S.
And even when I go to farmers markets, and the farmers selling eggs reassure me their chickens are on pasture, I often find that once I get home, the eggs look and taste like the factory-produced eggs. My theory is that most of these farmers are back-yard hobbyists or cattle farmers who keep a few chickens for extra cash, and who keep their chickens in coops surrounded by dirt areas, without grass.
Then, about a year ago, I found the eggs I was looking for in the U.S. They were in Whole Foods, and they came from a large producer: Vital Farms. All the eggs are labeled “Pasture-raised,” whether they are “organic”, “restorative”, or “true blues heirloom” eggs.
Frying up a couple of Vital Farms pastured eggs.
Vital Farms is essentially a contractor, with hundreds of small-farm suppliers. The name of the farm that produced your eggs is on the egg carton, and you can search it out on the company’s web site, and see videos of the chickens on pasture. The company talks about ethical treatment of its animals, and its employees. And a couple times when I’ve entered reports on social media that a few Vital Farms eggs weren’t up to their usual standards, I’ve received personal replies that suggested there would be followup to ensure the suppliers conform to the company’s high egg production standards.
I know such stuff sounds hokey, especially coming from a corporate producer that is publicly held. But I presume the farm suppliers are being adequately compensated, since they keep turning out high-quality eggs. Eggs, after all, are full of important nutrients, if the chickens are well fed and cared for.
The eggs aren’t cheap, though they don’t seem to me to be significantly more than the mass-produced junk eggs that are promised as “cage free” and even “organic.”
I just hope Vital Farms can keep it up. There are good signs—they’ve been around since 2007 and have been growing steadily since. But the stock over the last year has tanked, from about $50 a share to $10. Financial reports suggest that the company’s stock has been a victim of the commodity economy in which it operates, which has seen big rises in fuel and feed costs. Maybe a good time to buy in? In the meantime, they keep producing wonderful eggs.
Frying up a couple of Vital Farms pastured eggs
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Propublica, the independent nonprofit news provider, has a lengthy profile of Mark McAfee and his Raw Farm dairy, called “The Milkman”. It begins by quoting McAfee that he diverts raw milk found to contain pathogens into cheese-making operations, since cheese must be aged at least 60 days, which he claims kills any pathogens. Yuck! The piece goes downhill from there.
No matter how you feel about the benefits of raw milk, the notion of re-using tainted milk to make other foods isn’t very inviting, and may not be safe. Later in the article, McAfee disavows such special recycling of tainted milk.
The article goes into some detail about the dairy’s record of seemingly chronic outbreaks; it quotes Mary Martin, whose son Christopher was seriously sickened with ecoli O157:H7 back I 2008 after drinking the dairy’s milk.
The article also highlights the wide support Raw Dairy has from its large base of California customers, along with the wide support it seems to have accumulated within the California and national political establishments.
As a hit-job, I guess it does what it’s supposed to do. But it’s also as misleading as most of the articles that have come out over the last 20 years about the growing popularity of raw milk in that it strongly suggests that illnesses from one or a few farms mean that raw milk is inherently unsafe. It fails to acknowledge that there are dozens and dozens of dairies around America, Canada, and Europe that produce and sell safe raw milk year after year, without incident.
The article also fails to do any analysis of CDC data on raw milk illnesses. In the article’s defense, such data has become increasingly difficult to access, since the CDC has stopped doing even the most cursory compilations of the sort it did a decade and more ago. I’m not sure if the CDC is trying to prevent info showing a drop in illnesses from raw milk, or an increase. It doesn’t really matter; it just seems to be against the use of hard data to assess safety.
So basically, there’s some interesting history on the raw milk movement that launched in California in the late 1990s, and sad exploration of Mark McAfee’s sometimes delusional behavior, but overall, another wasted opportunity to seriously explore the realities of raw milk safety.
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